central state growth after 1920 that he celebrated for its postrevolutionary ‘new deal’ efforts, not that of the United States.41 Edwin Embree had long been involved in the Rosenwald Fund project to build schools for Blacks in the American Deep South. But Mexico’s public mechanism for constructing educational institutions in rural Mexico provided a novel model for thinking about the role of public government in modern society rather than that of private philanthropy.42 For these Americans, Rivera’s images had provided proof that the United States was not alone in conceiving of itself as a society of disparate cultures needing to be fused into a common whole. But those images functioned primarily as symbols of a monumental government attempt to harness the power of the central state in the pursuit of social reform, not as images of the romantic racial utopia.
The history of state involvement in the relationship between the Europeans who colonized Mexico and the native Americans they encountered there was not original to the postrevolutionary writings of Vasconcelos, Gamio, and Sáenz. Such thought has always been one of the dominant strands in Mexican intellectual history. In his assessment of the differences between social projects that came before and after the revolution, for example, Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro traced a line of antecedent projects that had attempted to merge Mexico’s indigenous cultures into the life of the nation-state as far back as the sixteenth century.43 Hernán Cortés, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Francisco Javier Clavijero, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, and Manuel Orozco y Berra—these and more had all attempted to reformulate the relationship of Mexico’s native Americans to the European power structures established by the Spanish invaders.44 These ideas about the relationship between the Indian and the European were a broad spectrum of models that stretched as far back in Mexican history as one cared to look, Villoro argued. One important precursor to postrevolutionary thought about the relationship of Mexico’s peoples to one another that had been reached in the late nineteenth century, for example, when the Porfirian era work of Francisco Pimentel, Francisco Bulnes, and Andrés Molina Enríquez had reformulated the Native American from a novelty to an integral sociological unit of the Mexican nation. “Before we were interested in the Indian as a relic of the past, as a tradition. But now he has been configured as a vital element of our national character,” wrote Villoro. “The Indian is now considered to be a living, breathing factor in our social life, an input into our nation whose efficient contribution we are all now in search of.”45 Operating from the vantage point of 1900, when the view of Mexican history seemed only to magnify Mexico’s military and economic weaknesses before the growth of the United States, Villoro wrote, Pimentel and others had accepted the assumption that only a reconfigured relationship of Mexico’s people to one another could produce a strong nation capable of withstanding foreign military power. While they stopped short of giving Indians autonomy within the nation, they nonetheless triumphed Native Americans as integral to fin de siècle Mexico. “A nation is an assemblage of men who share a common set of beliefs, who are guided by a single idea, and who labor toward the same goal,” wrote Pimentel in 1864. “So long as our Indians are segregated as they are today, Mexico cannot reach the rank of true nationhood.”46
But it was the heavy growth of the postrevolutionary federal state after 1920 that dramatically transformed the relationship of Mexico’s people to one another. The expansion of the postrevolutionary state was so rapid, in fact, that an important historiography dating to the 1970s began referring to the postrevolutionary Mexican government as the “Leviathan state.” The state had transformed itself into a top-down behemoth that imposed its will on the people of the nation, these scholars argued, as represented by the PRI party’s seventy-year dominance of Mexican politics across the twentieth century. Subsequent scholarship argued strongly that postrevolutionary state growth was real but not necessarily evidence in itself of an increasingly powerful federal government.47 But even those scholars who disputed the strength of Mexico’s central state agreed that the period 1920–1940 represented a moment of radical reformulation for the Mexican melting pot. The institutional state became the site of social transformation via policy work that sought to rebalance Mexican society in the aftermath of its terrible civil war. As Alan Knight has argued, “The revolutionaries’ discovery of the Indian … was paralleled by their commitment to state- and nation-building.”48 This was the institutional state from which Vasconcelos, Gamio, and Sáenz launched their policy projects in social fusion.
The generation who built Mexico’s central state in the years following the Mexican Revolution spoke of building a harmonic national symphony from a triptych of peoples. In the context of the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau and others have condensed America’s diverse ethnic and racial communities into what David Hollinger has called the twentieth-century racial pentagon.49 That formation is characterized by symbolic red, black, brown, yellow, and white hues, corresponding to the distinctive communities in North America, Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe from which America’s people are descended. In Mexico, the analogue consisted of the criollos, mestizos, and indígenas.50 Of a total population of 14 million persons the year before the beginning of the Mexican Revolution (1909), 2.25 million were criollos, or white foreigners born in Spain or to Spanish parents living in Mexico. These were Mexicans who had never intermarried with either the indígenas or the mestizos.51 The indígenas (Indians) numbered a total of 4.75 million persons, roughly 35 percent of the population, while 7 million persons representing 50 percent of the population were of mixed white and Indian blood, or mestizos. In the work of postrevolutionary social theorists, mid-century Mexican sociologists and anthropologists, and historians of twentieth-century Mexico, this triptych became the standard shorthand representation of Mexico’s peoples.
No one had identified the ethnic range of Mexico’s indigenous cultures, the indígenas, perhaps more than Andrés Molina Enríquez, who had once printed a list of 752 distinct tribes who he argued had left anthropological records of their presence in Mexico at the moment of the Spanish conquest.52 But the smaller number of fifty or so Indian groups became the conventional number for Mexico’s Indian cultures in the century of scholarship that followed after the revolution. No one could agree on precisely what constituted the definition of “indigenous.” Early in the century, affiliation based on phenotype was common, but as biological arguments for race became less defensible after 1900, cultural characteristics such as language and dress became more common markers. Statistics could fluctuate widely at any one moment as well, depending on the definition of language ability. The 1930 census counted 2.6 million speakers of indigenous languages, for example, 17 percent of a population base of 16.5 million people, but half of these were monolingual in one indigenous language and the other half bilingual in combination with Spanish.53 Indians could be reduced to 8.5 percent of the population, in other words, if monolingualism was the defining characteristic of indígena society.
Less in dispute in postrevolutionary society was the social distance that separated Mexico’s indigenous groups from the metropolis that had emerged as the agent of national consolidation. The Maya Indians of the Yucatán peninsula had managed to sustain a forty-year low-intensity conflict against the Porfirian state that had not ended until 1890, and these Maya, after the triumph of the revolutionary armies, remained dominant across a vast expanse of mountain and jungle that remains forbidding even today. In the far north, in the states of Sonora and Sinaloa immediately south of Arizona, the Yaqui Indians remained a marauding presence whose war parties continued to disrupt the economic projects of the national state. The Otomí people lived in the mountains of Hidalgo state, less than one hundred miles from Mexico City, yet they were largely independent from the political and economic projects of the state. Around Mexico City proper were the Aztec peoples, descendants of the original settlers of Tenochtitlán, while in eastern Michoacán, surrounding the vastness of Lake Pátzcuaro, were the Tarascan Indians. Each of the communities had a different relationship to the national state, just as individual Indian nations did to the federal government in the United States, yet in general they were characterized by independent economic and political systems that remained in place alongside the accelerating projects in nation building that surrounded them.
The mestizos were noteworthy for the sheer volume as a percentage of
